Media clause needs public scrutiny

Guelph Mercury

It appears the board of directors of the Waterloo Wellington Community Care Access Centre will soon examine the clause that exists in the agency’s contracts with its service providers related to contacting the media.

This has the potential to be a very productive and just exercise.

The board, at its next board meeting, is to receive a briefing about this clause. A public review of the purpose, equity, legality and problematic impacts of this clause is long overdue.

Some have termed this clause a gag order. It basically obliges Community Care Access Centre contractors and their employees to seek approval from the agency before they make comments to the media about a host of subjects.

Some examples of subjects that would be covered by the clause — or which local agencies have interpreted is covered — are: commenting on whether Community Care Access Centre budget issues are impacting the volume or level of illness of patients being seen; or even whether the quality of care in public home care is improving.

Something having the effect of stifling the ability of front-line service providers who are delivering a publicly funded service to speak up about issues of possible public interest and concern should trouble Ontario residents. That should be even more so when the service at issue is as invaluable as home care.

The local agencies with Community Care Access Centre contracts made no public noise about the state of the care centre’s recent mismanagement and what harm it was doing to their staff and patients — though the problems were so significant that the province just installed a third-party supervisor to come in and run the organization. That speaks volumes about how effective this media clause gag has proven to be.

Unlike the case with other areas of public health care delivery, it’s much more difficult for the home-care patient community to note areas of concern about service delivery and to network about this subject.

These are people receiving care in isolation from others. They’re often quite physically vulnerable, and sometimes intellectually limited as well. They would also often lack the context to have a sense of what level and forms of public home care they should be able to expect. Their front-line caregivers, however, can speak to these issues and to the nature of and changes they are observing in their work and their caseloads. They should be able to do so publicly as well.

We have contractual clauses barring, or being interpreted as barring, workers doing public home care from doing whistle-blowing about flaws in the system. That’s not a good thing.